The reference jumped from the page. Vernon Scannell, who has died at the age of 85, was a drifter, boxer and army deserter. He drank and fornicated his way across Fitzrovia (just north of the West End in London), said the obituary, until, "after a succession of jobs in the underbelly of teaching", he emerged as a poet. Wait a minute, I thought. That underbelly of teaching was me.

Scannell's path crossed with mine when I was 10 and he was desperate. The headmaster of the struggling prep school into which I had been decanted from the local primary must also have been desperate. Scannell had no degree or qualification. During the war he had been imprisoned for desertion. Afterwards he deserted again, changed his name and worked in a doll factory and as a fairground boxer. Finally court martialled, he was sent to a mental hospital after telling the judge that he was a poet who hated the folly of war and "feared the final extinction of humanity". A kindly psychiatrist discharged him.

The school, which lay in the Kent countryside and was called Hazlewood, clearly had some wildness in its veins. It had employed both Christopher Fry and Michael Tippett. Boys would roam the adjacent woods during break and were often lost. The headmaster, an eccentric man named Parry, had reputedly insisted, during the Battle of Britain, that sports day continue as a gesture of support for the pilots overhead, despite parents running for shelter under a rain of shrapnel.

Scannell had just two messages to convey to the nervous, rebellious Jenkins, who felt as out of place in the school as he did. One was the supremacy of boxing and the other of poetry. Scannell's first act was to ask the headmaster if he could erect a boxing ring in the assembly hall. Boys would duly line up, petrified, and only pretend to beat hell out of each other. But Scannell was a patient and sincere teacher of what he regarded as the "noble art". We knew nothing of his past as a professional boxer, only noting the misty-eyed reverence with which he viewed our rectangular canvas of needless pain.

To Scannell, I now realise, it was only in the ring that he was able to lay aside the miseries of a poor upbringing and war-scarred life and, for a moment, be utterly himself. Only in the ring did a man literally stand or fall by his wits.

For a poet whose work was shot through with the fear and futility of violence, boxing was a strange addiction. But then nor did we know that Scannell was a poet. All he communicated was a vague and distant preoccupation, as of a man with much to hide and only a little to give, even if that little was infinitely precious. He was out of John le Carré.

I came to love the rituals and rhythms of boxing, as against the mindless and muddy brutalism of rugby. I was intoxicated by the terrified adrenalin of an upcoming fight and the exhilaration of surviving it. Nothing at school was quite its equal. Certainly I liked Scannell and went on boxing until I was 18, by when the health and safety mafiosi were moving into schools to ban it. Heaven only knows if learned from the sport, but I believed I did, and see no harm and much virtue in schoolboy boxing's return to favour.

The classroom Scannell was a man transformed. He did not teach English, which presumably was his job. He simply read poetry from start to finish. He read the entire canon and made us read it back. We had to learn nothing by heart, but he did insist that we "recognise by heart" what he was reading. This rough diamond of a man would recite Marvell's To His Coy Mistress when close to tears (from his memoirs I can perhaps tell why). If only we had known that he also wrote the stuff, wrote of a life without direction which, none the less, "Ran like a fuse/ And brought me to you/ And love's bright, soundless detonation".

Keats, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Hardy, cascaded from the walls. In particular Scannell read the war poets, Owen, Brooke and Sassoon, with a feeling and a savagery that must have tested the headmaster's patriotism (if he ever knew). Poetry must always tell a story, he said, but do so by employing meter, scansion and song. I do not recall Eliot or Pound or anything lacking rhyme and rhythm. My eyes used to wander through the windows to the trees outside, where they saw that poetry was supremely true to life. Its potency has frightened me ever since.

Scannell was under-recognised as a poet, though he was eventually awarded a civil list pension. It cannot have helped that he listed his Who's Who hobbies as, besides drinking and boxing, "loathing Tories and New Labour". His poems were always clear in meaning and strong in emotion. He was to poetry was Edward Burra was to painting, teetering on the boundary of the surreal but never quite crossing it. Every line expressed his passion, every verse his anger or melancholia.

Above all, Scannell wanted to give a generation that had no knowledge of world war "a poetry that would tell them more exactly and movingly than any film or history book" what it was to live and serve in one. He later wrote allusively of Guy Fawkes night as a moment of awful recollection: "I am to hear/ The banshee howl of mortar and the talk/ Of men who died, am forced to taste my fear".

Scannell's faith in the truthfulness of poetry over all other mediums was boundless. He was a true working poet, industrious, unsentimental and self-aware. He wrote that "No one is really interesting until /To love him has become no longer easy." Hardy would have recognised him as a writer who "wishes to touch our hearts by showing his own."

In the 1970s, Scannell accepted the ill-conceived appointment of "poet in residence" on the dreadful Oxford housing estate of Berinsfield. He called his memoir of the job A Proper Gentleman, as the pub-crawling rebel was converted into horrified upmarket victim of gangs of yobs shouting nightly obscenities at him: "Scannell, poet!" He wrote, "It was as if I were a member of a persecuted minority, a Jew in an antisemitic society, a black among racists."

I did not know Scannell in later life, though we corresponded and he kindly sent me inscribed copies of his books. But I revelled in his verse. He was strong to the end and his glorious irony never left him. One of his last poems, Indian Summer, had him listening to Strauss's Tod und Verklärung,

And yet more faintly, now and then is

heard,

Closer, underneath my hand,

Dry whisper of a turning page,

As I peruse, with awful delectation,

The Oxford Book of Death.

So remember, all you drifting, drinking, despairing, self-demeaning schoolmasters. Hidden at the back of your class, pretending to be sullen and resistent, is a boy in whose imagination lurks unknown a spark waiting to be blown to flame. Scannell was even better than a good poet. He could teach.